
Haunted by the Ghost of Her 16-Year-Old Self, a Writer Returns to 1983
How do you write about a part of your life you can't remember? For the narrator of the Norwegian writer Linn Ullmann's autofictional novel 'Girl, 1983,' the not-remembering has become so urgent that it demands articulation. In 2019, the unnamed writer is in her mid-50s when a half memory resurfaces to haunt her: In the winter of 1983, when she was 16, she insisted on traveling alone from her mother's home in New York to Paris at the request of a much older, famous photographer.
As the memory floods back, the narrator feels like she is floating several inches above the ground while walking the dog; she lies on the bathroom floor, unable to bring herself to shower. She seeks out a psychiatrist, but he is of little use. She tells people she is 'hard at work' on a book about the girl she was in 1983, but this is a lie; she can't find the words. And then, as the ghost of her former self sits beside her, she begins to write through the fog.
'Be accurate. I can't. Be specific. I don't know how,' Ullmann writes. 'Precision is the minimum requirement. Not just for writers and artists, but also for girls who claim they're old enough to travel across the Atlantic by themselves and have their picture taken.'
But there is no precision in 'Girl, 1983.' The book is endlessly recursive, as shapeless as water. It pools, eddies, evaporates. A blue coat and a red hat, worn on that trip to Paris, reappear and reappear and reappear. Little else ever comes into focus.
The narrative flips vertiginously between past and present, mimicking the movements of a mind circling trauma, repeating itself, reaching the threshold of a memory then darting away. The line breaks and white spaces threaten to overtake the type. The older woman's present timeline is as vague as the past she tries to grasp. Dialogue exists only in fragments, scene hardly at all. The reader is often lost, with no authorial hand to steady us.
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